King of Upper Egypt 50 Points

King of the Two Lands 100 Points

Author Comments

Senet is an Ancient Egyptian game for two players, each with a set of a maximum of 7 pieces, although the game can be played with lesser but equal number of pieces (i.e: 6, 5 , 4, etc. pieces each). The board consists of 30 tiles called houses, arranged in three rows of 10 squares each. The pieces are placed alternatively starting on tile 1 and ending on tile 10.

Red plays first. You may start with any piece that can make a legal move.

Press the Dice Button to see how many tiles to move your piece forward.

Pieces move around the board from left to right in the first row, right to left in the second row and left to right in the third row.

A piece cannot land on a tile occupied by a piece belonging to that same player.

When a piece lands on a tile occupied by the other player’s piece, they switch places, unless that player has two or more pieces in a row, in which case the pieces are “protected”. Pieces on tile 26 (“House of Happiness”), 28 (“House of the Spirits”) and 29 (“House of the Double”) are always safe from being switched.
When a player has 3 or more pieces in a row, it “blocks” the other player’s pieces and these cannot pass.

As you play along, you may encounter situations in which a move is not possible and you must therefore relinquish your turn. If you obtain a 1 or 4 and you cannot move a piece, you will be given another turn. This may go on until you obtain a 5 (lose a turn) or another number
that lets you move.

Special Squares:

The House of Rebirth (Tile 15): Your piece will land here after falling on the Nile.

The Nile River (Tile 27). If the House of Rebirth is occupied (by you or your opponent), then you must land on the previous closest unoccupied tile.

The House of Seth (Tile 21): This is an evil tile. You can only exit with numbers 1, 4 or 6. This last number will drop you straight onto the river, though.

How to get pieces out of the Senet board:

IMPORTANT: To exit the board, the first row must be emptied of that player’s pieces.

All pieces must land on the House of Happiness (Tile 26) before proceeding to the last three tiles. From the House of Happiness you can move to any of the last 4 squares by obtaining the corresponding number:

• 1 – Fall into the river and move back to the House of Rebirth.

2 – Land on the House of the Spirits (Khu) (Tile 28). Moving from here to the last 2 squares is prohibited. You must get a 3 to leave the board.

• 3 – Land on the House of the Double (Ka) (Tile 29). Moving from here to the last square is prohibited. You must get a 2 to leave the board.

• 4 - Land on the last tile. You must get a 1 to leave the board afterwards.

• 6 - Leave the board.
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Version 1.0.1 Notes:
* Completely ported to AS3
* 1062 total lines of code (-255)
* Play Again button not working as intended has been fixed
* Game will no longer freeze when clicking between turns
* CPU prioritizing forming 3 consecutive chips when moving to an empty tile over moving to the House of Happiness has been changed
* Minor changes in pseudo-random number generator
* Mouse hovering opponent’s pieces will no longer light them

Version 1.0.2 Notes:
* 1038 total lines of code (-24)
* Solved issue regarding CPU not swapping piece when in House of Happiness tile
* Added another priority to the CPU as a result of the previous bug

Reviews

It is uncanny as to how the cpu ALWAYS manages to get what it needs. Just when I thought that I might have caught a break, in comes the string of 5's to allow the cpu to catch up.
It seems like a pretty fun game to play. However, it would be MORE fun if the cards weren't stacked against me. It's too unbalanced.

The CPU almost acts as if it controls the board... It got a chain of fours―twice! Luckily, I had a piece blocking its path, or else it might have won. The game should be balanced a bit (in my opinion) so that the chain can only go on up to, say, four, with an one or four turn causing a turn loss (as if the player had rolled a five). Otherwise from that, nice game!

This is a bit different from the real Senet-board I once played on (it had more squares, and I always thought every player had no choice but to use 7 pieces), but it's nonetheless an entertaining electronic version of one of mankind's oldest games.

The two-player mode is more fun (it's always more fun to play against a friend imo) but the singleplayer is ok, too. Like you wrote, the CPU is hard to beat, it's quite challenging, but manageable.
Maybe the younger NG-audience isn't too fond of classic boardgames.
I think you did a good job in coding/programming here!